CIA Took Issue With Panel's Failure To Examine The Role Of High-Level Bush White House Officials.
The complete sentence would not fit into the Subject Line... so I snipped it up. See below.
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Senate Report On CIA Torture Fails To Answer One Question: What Now?
Ali Watkins - HuffPo
Posted: 12/10/2014 3:48 pm EST Updated: 3 hours ago
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WASHINGTON -- Americans woke up Wednesday forced to reckon with the gruesome findings of the Senate Intelligence Committee's gut-wrenching report on the CIA's post-9/11 torture program. But despite the many sobering revelations in the summary of the report released Tuesday, there are notable gaps in the Senate study that make it unclear what purpose the investigation will serve in the future. The report leaves both the agency’s defenders and its critics asking the same question: Now what?
The study offers no recommendations for improving the systemic problems it highlights. It suggests no legal action against any of the alleged perpetrators -- even the CIA officers who, the investigators claim, committed some of the program’s grossest abuses. And it fails to clearly assign responsibility to the high-level Bush administration officials who have publicly said that they were fully briefed and that the agency did not misrepresent information on the torture program.
These gaps are even more striking given that the original terms of the Senate study specified that the investigation was meant to change interrogation policy going forward.
“The purpose is to review the program and to shape detention and interrogation policies in the future,” Senate Intelligence Committee Chair Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) wrote in the 2009 press release announcing the study. The release said that the investigation would focus on the CIA’s management of the program, the basis for detaining certain individuals, the legal backing for the program itself and an evaluation of the information that was obtained through the use of enhanced interrogation techniques.
But the study clearly focused primarily on the last of those areas. At least in the 500-page summary that was made public, the investigators neglect to comprehensively examine the role of top Bush administration officials in commissioning and authorizing the CIA program. They also decline to provide recommendations about how to prevent such a program from being re-established.
The CIA, for its part, offered its own recommendations for reforms in a rebuttal issued Tuesday, citing the absence of such proposals in the Senate report. These recommendations include implementing new mechanisms to provide consistent, timely information to the Justice Department and updating the agency's requirements about the way sensitive programs are operated.
In its rebuttal, the CIA took particular issue with the Senate panel's failure to examine or even clearly acknowledge the role of high-level Bush White House officials. The spy agency has insisted that it conducted the program with approval from people high up in the administration, while the Senate panel charges that the CIA acted in defiance of orders.
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More: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/12/10/senate-cia-torture_n_6285232.html
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